Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  For years the railroad was the most profitable in the world, and at one point its shares at $295 were the highest-priced stock on the New York Exchange. Then, on May 10, 1869, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States were joined in Utah with the laying of the last rails of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads; the profits of the Panama Railroad fell dramatically. The company was sold ten years later for $25 million to a French enterprise that unsuccessfully attempted to build a canal across the isthmus following the same line as the railroad.

  The Panama Railroad, four years after its completion. (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1859)

  The United States took the railroad over in 1904 and it played a key role in the construction of the Panama Canal.15 Today, after reconstruction in the late 1990s of much of the original route staked out by John L. Stephens and James Baldwin a century and half earlier, the railroad still hauls passengers and freight across the Isthmus of Panama.16

  Acknowledgments

  The genesis of this book came about through a perfect storm of co-incidents. In the late 1990s I was living in the Spanish colonial town of Antigua, Guatemala, when a friend named Jane Binaris one day handed me a copy of John Lloyd Stephens’s Incident of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán. At the time, I had made the acquaintance of Edwin Shook, who had retired in Antigua after a long career as one of the world’s great Maya archaeologists. Aware that I was soon returning to my home in San Francisco, he asked if I would help him sell a small library he had assembled of Central American books and periodicals to the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. I agreed and before I left, as a reward, he carefully laid on his work table the extremely rare hand-colored originals of Frederick Catherwood’s Views of Ancient Monuments. At the time I was in the thrall of Stephens’s fresh, vivid account of his adventures with Catherwood, and I was stunned by the beauty of the images before me. Though I was unable to interest the university in Shook’s collection, to my surprise I discovered that the Bancroft Library had in its archives Stephens’s personal letters and papers. The synergy of these events inspired me to write Jungle of Stone, and my deepest appreciation for making it possible belongs to the late Edwin Shook and my dear friend Jane Binaris, who I regret did not live to see it in print, and to the Bancroft Library, where by coincidence I had worked as a student library page decades earlier.

  It is difficult to heap enough praise on the books of John L. Stephens, whose brilliant, accessible writing and delightful companionship has won legions of fans over the last century and three-quarters. If Jungle of Stone is one tenth as well-written, interesting, and entertaining as his work, I should be extremely fortunate, and I strove throughout its writing to do him at least a small measure of justice. And if this book does nothing else than bring readers to Stephens, I would consider it a success. The vast rewards of his writing lay well beyond the pinched perimeter of this book.

  As every author knows, no book is written in a vacuum, and for this book the vacuum is filled with experts, friends, and colleagues who helped give it life. Only one biography has been written about Stephens and another about Catherwood, both by the late Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, and to him I owe the biographical bones of this volume. Many scholars informed my understanding of the history and politics of Central America, but none better than Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., whose remarkable Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Central America, 1821–1871 stands as a comprehensive and compelling tale of the woes that befell the region in the mid-nineteenth century. For my modest comprehension of the ancient Maya, I owe a great debt to innumerable authorities, but several stand out: Robert J. Sharer, Arthur Demarest, Michael D. Coe, Simon Martin, Nikolai Grube, Ian Graham, David Freidel, Linda Schele, Joy Parker, Peter Mathews, and Richard Hansen.

  One author in particular helped me fill in the broader story of the search for the ancient Maya. David M. Pendergast and his wonderful Palenque: The Walker-Caddy Expedition to the Ancient City, 1839–1840 brought out of the shadows a little-known expedition that made the adventure richer and more exciting, and allowed me to step back and explore the wider theme of the British Empire versus American individual enterprise. And even though there was a wealth of detail in the newspaper accounts of the sinking of the SS Arctic, David W. Shaw’s riveting The Sea Shall Embrace Them: The Tragic Story of the Steamship Arctic brought the horrifying tragedy vividly to life.

  Tracking down and reproducing the original hand-colored Views of Ancient Monuments by Catherwood would not have been possible without the help of John Weeks, head librarian of the University of Pennsylvania Museum Library, and Alessandro Pezzati, museum archivist. I am also deeply grateful to my friend Alec Dubro, who unselfishly gave me an 1843 first edition of Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, which allowed me the opportunity to view and reproduce the fine-line original black-and-white engravings of Catherwood’s work.

  In my early research, I found important primary documents at the New York Historical Society, where my appreciation goes to Loraine Baratti in the manuscript department. Jungle of Stone could never have been written without the help of the staff at the University of California Library, Berkeley, and the university’s special research collections at the Bancroft Library. In addition, my thanks go to archaeologist Richard C. Bronson, who provided me with historical information on Guatemala’s Rio Dulce and the town of Izabal where Stephens and Catherwood landed and started their journey. I also owe a debt to three people in Britain, who personally aided me in my research into the life of Frederick Catherwood. Fiona Hodgson and Julie Redman, descendants of the Catherwood family, provided me with a family tree and information on Catherwood’s early life in London. And I am grateful to Selwyn Tillet, whose research on Scotsman Robert Hay turned up an important letter that shed light on the trial of Catherwood’s cousin, Henry Caslon.

  My friends Neil Friedman, Stephen Magagnini, and especially Ed Gilmore deserve awards for their generosity in reading parts and the whole of my manuscript and providing advice and crucially needed encouragement. I am grateful to so many of my friends for their support over the years. But for their constant belief in me and their ever-patient encouragements, I especially wish to thank Ellen Retter, who took me to see Stephens’s tomb in New York City, Rick Carlsen, Chris Carlsen, Dorothy May, Barbara Arbunich, John Pearlman, Mark Liss, Bonnie Burt, Kathi McPherson, and Terry and Joanne Dale. And this book would never even have been contemplated if it were not for Carol DeRuiter, who took a fifteen-year-old boy and introduced him to the glories of the written word (and rigors of English grammar), and to her husband, Peter DeRuiter, who made me believe I could accomplish anything if I put my mind to it.

  To my agent, Geri Thoma at Writers House, thank you for believing in this project from the beginning, and to Genevieve Gagne-Hawes for such superb editing that the book actually became a reality. For my editor, Peter Hubbard, I reserve my deepest appreciation for seeing the potential in Jungle of Stone, and understanding where it was weak and where it was strong. At my publisher William Morrow and HarperCollins, I am indebted to the hard work of Nick Amphlett, Lauren Janiec, Kaitlyn Kennedy, Paul Lamb, and Owen Corrigan. Thank you to cartographer Nick Springer, and I must express my awe at the skill and stamina of copy editor Tom Pitoniak.

  And for literally keeping me alive and never giving up on me, for bearing the weight of endless monologues about Stephens and Catherwood, Morazán and Carrera, with encouragement and astonishing patience and grace, for being the pillar and love of my life, I will never be able to sufficiently express the depths of my gratitude to Kathie O’Shea. Moreover, few people are as fortunate as I have been to have had the constant companionship of Rosalita and Roxanne, who literally had my back throughout the writing of Jungle of Stone.

  Finally, for their incredible beauty, dignity, and resilience, I will hold in my heart always the extraordinary Maya people—the descendants of the ancient Maya—whom I have had the good fortune to meet throughout my journeys throug
h Guatemala, Honduras, Yucatán, and Chiapas, Mexico. May you forever keep your rich culture alive for the benefit of us all.

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